Open Door Policy - The policy and the interpretation

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Measured in one way, the Open Door policy might be evaluated as a success.
Considering what a weak hand the United States actually held in China
between the 1890s and the 1930s, it arguably played the game well,
constantly manipulating its rivals into paying at least lip service to
American policy and helping to prevent an all-out scramble for China. Even
if Americans failed to achieve the market of which they dreamed, 1 or 2
percent of U.S. exports still represented an enormous amount of trade.
Measured against the aspirations of its most ardent supporters, however,
the Open Door policy rates as a failure. While American businessmen and
social reformers elaborated a vision of China as a protégé
nation offering boundless opportunity for profit and good deeds, the
reality was something else entirely. From the very moment when the Open
Door was conceived and identified as a distinctive American policy,
powerful forces went to work against it: the treaty port colonialism of
the European powers, the rise of a robust Japan eager for control of the
mainland, and mounting resistance within China itself.

If these forces destroyed American policy in China, they hardly demolished
the idea of the Open Door. On the contrary, the architects of the Open
Door policy, whatever their achievements—or lack thereof—in
China, helped to establish an attitude toward the non-Western world that
would persist powerfully in the Cold War era and beyond. The problem that
confronted John Hay in 1899 had called for a decision of epoch-making
importance. By what means would the nation extend its reach overseas? The
emerging industrial economy seemed to demand bold steps to acquire new
markets abroad, but ideological and political traditions made Americans,
outside of a brief fascination with territorial acquisition at the time of
the Spanish-American War, averse to formal colonialism. The principal
contribution of Hay, Rockhill, Knox, Straight, Reinsch, Hughes, and the
other guardians of the door was to resolve the dilemma through a formula
that enabled the United States to pursue an aggressively expansionist
economic policy, while avoiding the taint of political domination and the
burdens of territorial administration. It was a clever solution that,
whatever its immediate failures in China, established the pattern for many
decades of American foreign policy.

William Appleman Williams and his followers recognized the pattern and
elaborated an "open door interpretation" of U.S. foreign
policy that remains strongly influential more than forty years after
Williams published the foundational text
The Tragedy of American Diplomacy.
In the writings of these scholars, the open door metaphor not only
survived its eclipse in the 1930s Far East, it emerged as one of the most
enduring interpretive concepts in the study of U.S. foreign relations. The
interpretation remains powerful mainly because it provides a persuasive
answer to one of the questions at the heart of the study of American
foreign relations: How is it that the United States could be the
world's most vociferous opponent of colonialism yet also a
remarkably interventionist nation that would, in the second half of the
twentieth century, control one of the largest empires, albeit of a new and
different sort, that the world had ever known? Williams, Walter LaFeber,
Thomas McCormick, and others suggest that the promotion of free trade
enabled American capitalists to have it both ways. Under the banner of
high-minded principles that supposedly enhanced the interests of all
nations, they could justify all sorts of political, economic, and military
action to prop up a system that in practice enabled the United States to
reap more than its proportionate share of the profits.

The open door interpretation remains influential for two additional
reasons. First, it provides a neat, totalizing explanation for more than a
century of American history stretching back into the period of continental
expansion. For advocates of the open door interpretation, the quest for
over-seas economic opportunity was simply an extension of the westward
push that extended the U.S. market to the Pacific Ocean. With the closure
of the frontier in the 1890s, the interpretation suggests, U.S. businesses
turned their attention to overseas markets and justified the expansion of
American influence through the same ideology of open markets and
individual opportunity that had prevailed at home. Constant penetration of
new markets was, in this view, essential to the health of an American
capitalist system that depended on an ever-expanding economy to preserve
social harmony in a nation characterized by vast inequities of wealth.
According to the open door interpretation, American expansion in the
1890s, Wilson's appeals for an open global economy, and American
determination to prevent the Sovietization of Eastern Europe in the late
1940s all stemmed from the same impulse to find and preserve markets for
American industry and preserve domestic tranquility.

Second, the open door interpretation remains influential because it helps
explain one of the most salient characteristics of twentieth-century
international affairs, the tense relationship between the United States
and much of the nonindustrial world. Americans, Williams and other argue,
have persistently viewed their liberal principles as conducive to the
development of the Third World. In practice, however, free trade has
tended to concentrate wealth in industrial nations and to deprive poor
countries on the periphery of control over their own economic
circumstances. Increasingly, Third World peoples found themselves locked
into subordinate roles as suppliers of raw materials and consumers of good
manufactured elsewhere. "To many through the world," wrote
Williams, "the Open Door Policy appeared to confront them with a
door closed to their own progress." When nations attempted to break
out of this unfavorable relationship and claim control over their own
economies, the open door interpretation suggests, they confronted
counterrevolutionary U.S. intervention aimed at restoring them to the
integrated international economy dominated by Washington. During the Cold
War, the pattern repeated itself in Iran, Guatemala, Cuba, Vietnam, Chile,
Nicaragua, and many other places where the United States resisted the
emergence of nationalist or leftist governments that threatened American
economic privileges. The open door interpretation offers a power
explanation for the trail of repression and blood left by American
activity across the Third World.